Fake winner on Twitter

Monkey_Chinchilla

The winner of this competition for a holiday to Morocco:
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5057261

was posted on 10 Sep:
@SwiftCarHire:
Congratulation we can now announce the winner of our competition... @Frazer1 DM your contact details please. Thank you all who participated

When it was pointed out it was a fake account (ie no followers, not following Swift Car Hire, not Tweeted anything including the competition RT) Swift Car Hire responded by saying if he doesn't contact them within 48 hours they will pick a new winner.

They have since posted a photo of the 'tickets' booked in the fake winners name.

Hmm, I smell a rat.

How can you win a competition that you need to follow and RT when you have done neither?

mrsHall2b

theyve obviously contacted with details though as on the picture of the tickets it says frazer collins & his 2 friends names..

sleepyjones

Maybe he actually won it elsewhere, ie Facebook or a form ... but they asked him to make a twitter account so they could announce the winner on Twitter?

Chopstheduck

def looks dodgy to me, it would be easy enough to mock up a page and edit the ticket names. My betting is that Omar Ali and Nafisa Iliyas actually bought tickets and the company used their tickets to run a fake competition then edit the webpage to add a fake winner in. A comp for three is unusual too.

The twitter account was created in 2008 and not used, so obviously a very old abandoned account.

hannonle

The only other possibility is that the winners twitter id is similar but they have misspelled it on the announcement.

Chopstheduck

I also am a little suspicious that the director of swift cars is pakistani and the other two winners names are also arabic/islamist, a male and female. It could easily be coincidence that the winner was also pakistani, but it also makes it likely that the winner was a friend or family.


I;ve also found twitter followers of the page under the names omar and ilyas.

claire21

I didn't enter but looked at their fb page and decided against it on the basis of that
https://www.facebook.com/swift.carhire?fref=photo

blessed.by

I saw this as well I thought it was scammy. The person never responded on twitter and he didn't even follow or RT the comp.

I've since unfollowed them but I'm unsure if anything can really be done to the company for running an fake comp?

sleepyjones

Funny you posted this today, just saw this on Facebook (from Squishotel) :

Good Afternoon, we have been having some negative feedback regarding our prizes and competitions, any competitions that we have on Facebook are legitimate as are the winners chosen. Miles Davies commented on our picture at 1.40pm on the 7th September.
He was chosen fairly as he had liked and shared our page and our post on the 7th September. It now appears that his profile has been reported as fraudulent and his post along with his profile are no longer visible. We do not speculate on profiles however we did send him a message yesterday which was read this morning disproving that a profile was created 3 hours ago."

mrsHall2b

i didnt even know it was run on fb aswell. i entered, its bad how companies do it just to get more followers etc

Chopstheduck

wow, i think we are being watched, the tweet with the winners twitter account appears to have disappeared? I can't see it on their feed now.